I have often recommended the videos of the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge. Each is about 7 minutes long, presented one each day, for a week. Peter Robinson interviews serious people with serious ideas about current events and history.

This week’s guest is Vaclav Klaus, the President of the Czech Republic. He was born in Prague in 1941 during WWII, grew up in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. After earning a doctorate in economics he pursued a career in academia and at the Czechoslovak State Bank. Immediately after the Velvet Revolution of 1989, Klaus entered politics. A founder of the Civic Democratic Party, he served 1992 to 1997 as prime minister of the Czech Republic. In 2003 he was elected president, a position to which he was reelected in 2008.

The first segment concerns the events of 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. The second segment is about the parallels to be drawn between a united Europe and the late Warsaw Pact. In the third, Mr. Klaus takes on Al Gore and points out the similarities in ideology between communism and environmentalism. And the Thursday segment is about how he became an advocate for the free market while studying economics under communism.

The previous interview was with Victor Davis Hanson, classical scholar and military historian and Robert Baer, former CIA agent who served in the Middle East, discussing with Peter Robinson the problem of Iraq. It is a stunning conversation.

All of the previous Uncommon Knowledge interviews are available in the NRO archives. I cannot recommend them highly enough. Try one segment of your choice. I’ll bet you get hooked!

According to an Earth Day survey of schoolchildren, one in three children between the ages of six and eleven think that the earth will have been destroyed by the time they grow up. The telephone survey conducted by Opinion Research polled a national sample of preteens, 250 boys and 250 girls.

Kids worry about the state of the planet, especially about clean air and clean water, regardless of their parents actions to recycle or make other efforts to be green. 50 percent say that hurricanes and tornadoes are the natural disasters that scare them the most. 28 percent say that they fear that animals such as polar bears and penguins will become extinct and disappear from the planet.

Minority kids are even more anxious. 75 percent of black children and 65 percent of Hispanic children believe that the planet will be irrevocably damaged by the time they grow up. Urban children are more anxious than suburban children.

Thank you, Al Gore, the Sierra Club, and all the green propagandists in the education establishment. This is child abuse. Kids write about polar bears for class projects.

I wrote a short post last December about DNA studies that determined that polar bears had been around much longer than estimated. It had been assumed that they evolved from brown bears fairly recently. Genetic studies determined that the polar bear had been around for at least 130,000 years, through warmer periods and cooler periods, and we probably didn’t need to worry about their surviving the slight warming that we have had. We could probably take them off the “might become endangered” list.

The post was illustrated with a really cute picture of a polar bear cub. We have had 26,000 hits on that one post — mostly from school children working on class projects. I hope that some of them read it to find out that the bears are probably not endangered, but I imagine that most of them were simply after the picture of the cub. I know it’s kid’s homework, because the hits stop during school vacations.

In England, the High Court ordered schools to give an equal amount of time to the scientific proof that many of Al Gore’s claims in “An Inconvenient Truth” were unsupportable, false, and just plain wrong. We have had no such luck in this country, and his celebrated propaganda powerpoint is constantly shown in the schools. The polar bear was chosen by environmental activists specifically to arouse worries about extinction, and by extension to use their habitat needs to prevent any possible drilling for oil.

Unnecessarily scaring kids seems like a particularly sleazy way to try to accomplish green fantasies.

Much ado is made over Nobel Peace Prize Laureates. A highly coveted and ostensibly prestigious award; we are supposed to be deeply impressed by the winners. But should we really be? Just how much is a Nobel Peace Prize worth?

During WWII, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.

Being German, she KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews. Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of her tool box she carried, and she also carried in the back of her truck a Burlap sack, (for larger children).

She also had a dog in the back of the truck that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog, but the barking covered the children/infants noises.

During her time and course of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 children/infants.

She was caught, and the Nazi’s broke both her legs and arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the children she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her backyard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it, and reunited the families. Most, of course, had been gassed.

Those children she helped were placed into foster family homes or adopted out.

I am not impressed with the “changing of the year”. I don’t like New Year’s predictions, resolutions, endless displays of diet books, and the trite lists of ten best and ten worst. They are lazy efforts at glorifying the work of newsmen who increasingly are unable to identify what is important and what is trivial, and don’t want to put much effort into year-end columns.

Canadian columnist David Warren is a man after my own heart. For his “Man of the Year ” column he says:

For my last Sunday column of anno MMVIII, I will announce my selection for “Man of the Year.” It was, at most, a year of thin choices in the public and political realm. Once again, Al Gore did not make my list of finalists.

I didn’t like any of the newly-elected presidents, either; not Asif Ali Zardari, “Mr. Ten Percent” of Pakistan; nor Dimitry Medvedev, the Russian place-holder; nor Ma Ying-jeou, the smooth compromiser of independent Taiwan; nor Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana (if he has indeed won); nor even Morgan Tsvangirai of Zimbabwe (who won the election, but did not become president); or Barack Obama of the United States (who won but is not yet installed). I have invested no hope in any of them, and thus must hope to be surprised.

Among Time magazine’s rival list of candidates, I was immediately able to eliminate Steve Jobs, Bruce Springsteen, George Clooney, Rem Koolhaas, “Brad and Angelina,” Oprah Winfrey, and even Laura Bush’s library-science nominee, the Afghan novelist Khaled Hosseini — along with several dozen others among the world’s current, media-recognized, “leaders and revolutionaries, heroes and pioneers, scientists and thinkers, artists and entertainers, builders and titans,” to say nothing of their chefs. (I noticed that nobody nominated Bernie Madoff.)

I also consulted the “100 most beautiful people” of People magazine. After eliminating overlap from the list above, I further discounted “Kate,” “Salma,” Carrie,” the entire cast of Gossip Girl, Jessica Alba, their respective boyfriends where applicable, and anyone with the first name “Vanessa.”…

The whole delightful column is to be found here. You will be surprised at his choice of “Man of the Year”, and appreciate his reasons for his choice. Restores my interest in year-end lists.

Many Republicans are fretting over recent polling (RCP average Obama +5.9) in the presidential election, fearing, as some pundit on CNN declared, “the election is over”. Liberals, on the other hand, are quite cocky.

But let’s hold on for just a second and put things in persepective. A quick google search indicates things may not be as dire as Republicans fear and liberals, and the media (redundant, I know) would have us believe. Let’s take a little trip back in the time machine:

Newsweek Sept 30-Oct 2, 2004: Kerry 49 Bush 46

AP/Ipsos October 4-6, 2004: Kerry 50 Bush 46

Reuters/Zogby October 6-8, 2004: Kerry 46 Bush 45

Gallup Sept 30-Oct 2, 2000: Gore: 47 Bush 39

And there is more reason for optimism. AsHotAir reports, the McCain campaign is saying it’s going to take the gloves off and start calling attention to Obama’s nefarious associations with criminals and radicals since the MSM won’t.

If they also start pointing the finger at Obama and Democrats for the financial crisis, and drawing attention to the big bucks and advisers Obama got from Fannie Mae, then things might actually turn around.